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The fifth of the Walker family novels does not really qualify as suspense, because we know whodunit within the first few pages. What really happens is that Jance alternates between the murderer central to this novel, murderers who were central to previous Walker family novels, and the traditional sagas of the Tohono O'odham which, in many ways, parallel or echo the stories of the living.
Dramatis personae: Brandon Walker, retired from the police force; Lani Walker-Pardee, emergency physician and traditional Tohono O'odham medicine woman; Dan Pardee, Apache, member of the all-Indian border patrol group known as the Shadow Wolves, dog handler; Gabriel Ortiz, Lani's bratty godson; Delia Ortiz, Tohono O'odham tribal chairwoman; Leo Ortiz, Gabriel's father and Delia's husband; Amos Warren, collector of artifacts who, unfortunately, collects some bullets early on; Ava Martin, lovely, virulent killer; John Lassiter, wrongly imprisoned for killing Amos, his adopted father and business partner, MS victim; John's estranged daughter, who also has MS, Amanda Wasser; Max, Carlos, Paul, and Timmy, the José brothers, some of whom have become carriers of contraband; Timmy is Gabe's best friend; JP Beaumont, restless, saddened, and retired Seattle detective; Ralph Ames, JP's impeccable lawyer.
In the Walker Family novels, JA Jance pairs JP Beaumont with retired Tucson policeman Brandon Walker. In DANCE OF THE BONES, readers spend most of their reading time following Brandon Walker and Lani Walker-Pardee, with JP Beaumont providing backup from Seattle.
The novel may be said to have multiple plots: a plot of murder to assuage an overweening greed for gain and power; a plot following the coming-of-age of an angry teen and his best friend; a plot of a wrongly imprisoned aging and ill man and his daughter who are tenuously seeking to re-connect their family ties; and finally, Tohono O'odham traditional tales, which story the formation of Papago ethos and name the tribe's traditional heroes.
As the novel opens, we learn that Ava Martin has gunned down Amos Warren, collector of Indian artifacts. His business associate John Lassiter has been imprisoned in a seemingly open-and-shut case for Amos's killing, but once Brandon Walker begins treating Amos' death as a cold case, evidence that John was not the killer begins surfacing.
Ava, meanwhile, has begun importing contraband through the use of various hired mules. Her current bunch are brothers in the José family, who feel compelled to seek financial reward of any type in order to support their hospitalized mother. Two of these brothers become a body trail that points back to Ava, whose greed is so extreme that, readers may realize, she is the archetype or persona of greed, in opposition to the Tohono O'odham notions of placing tribal health and happiness before the health and happiness of any single individual.
Entrapped in Ava's net is Timmy José, the youngest brother, whose best friend is Gabe Ortiz. Gabe, a disaffected teen, is more than annoyed that his parents distrust the Jose brothers. Gabe's godmother, Lani, a medicine woman, and Brandon Walker's adopted child, decides that the only way to cause Gabe to respect his parents is to perform a curing ceremony for him on Kit Peak, a mountain sacred to the Tohono O'odham. The stories that she wants to tell him are hero stories in which groups of people and animals try to improve the tribe's food sources and its rain. Gabe sneers at his godmother's old-fashioned notions; he is unable to see how her stories are in fact the same story in which he is living.
The charm of J.A. Jance's novel is in the way Tohono O'odham traditional tales run parallel to the actions of modern humans. The central stories of Amanda's faith in her wrongly-imprisoned father and Gabe's clumsy but necessary search for himself give the work its moral center. I am afraid that, as the Walker family saga has lengthened, more and more backstory occupies the pages of the most recent installment. That surely has happened here.
§ Cathy Downs, Ph.D., is professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and a fan of the well-wrought whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, September 2015
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